Exactly. The math is clear, different speaker cable lengths create a time phase mismatch so severe there is no point in trying to fix it. Electricity is just too fast. I’m not clear why
@DeLub is double checking the math, why do extra work when the video clearly shows everything visually.
I'm not doubting math at all, I'm just doubting the way the youtuber applies math. You can do all your divisions correctly, but if you should have been multiplying, you will still end up with the wrong answer. And that's what I'm saying: his reasoning is flawed.
Let me try explaining it differently without doing any calculation with these large numbers. Electrons travel at very high speed through the cable; sound travels at relatively (compared to the speed of light) slow speed through the air. The extra length the electrons have to travel in one cable will cost a certain amount of extra time. Since the speeds of electrons is very high, this will cost only a very small amount of time. Because the speed of sound is
slower, in this same amount of time the traveled distance by the sound in the air is
smaller. This means that if you want to compensate for extra cable length, you would have to move your speaker back a certain distance that is
smaller then the difference in cable length. ... and not larger like the conclusion of the youtube video. (The calculation I did in my previous post for a difference in cable length of 1 inch.)
Let's approach it from a yet different point of view (including math
). Let's say I'm totally convinced by the video. I bought the recommended brand of loudspeaker wire and did my best to cut it into two exactly equal halves. And I was quite successful! I measured the difference between the two cables, and it is only 1/1000 of an inch! Impressive wire cutting, right? Now let's see how much I have to move my speaker to compensate for this 1/1000" difference. Let's do the same math as in the youtube video but instead of 1 inch we take 1/1000 of an inch.
- Electricity travels 152,964,970,608,384,000,000 1/1000 inches per second
- Sound travels 174,949,632,000,000 1/1000 inches per second
- Let's substract: electricity has jumped ahead 152,964,795,658,752,000,000 inches
Wow! that's even a larger difference than in the youtube video for a difference of 1 inch. (note btw that his substraction is off. he forgot three zeros at the end)
This should clearly be a trigger to note that his logic is wrong: a smaller difference in cable length, can never lead to having to compensate with a larger distance between speakers.
And what about the wire used inside the speaker? If there's a difference between two speakers, I cannot compensate... and what about a difference in length between the wire running to the woofer and the wire running to the tweeter? Oh man...
(Also not that I'm not looking at other things like phase and resistance of the cable and things like that. Just like the youtuber doesn't.)